Customer Service Blog

Tag Archives: handle-time

In a perfect world, your contact center would never put callers on hold. If hold time is unavoidable, the next best thing to do is offer a call-back option. Removing the frustration of hold time will lead to happier callers. For many contact centers, this improvement in the customer experience is the primary, or even sole, motivation for adding call-backs. (If you need a reminder of how much callers dislike waiting on hold, just take a moment to scan the tweets at onholdwith.com.) But there’s another angle to this story.

When deployed correctly, call-backs can deliver concrete ROI through several paths: lowered abandon rates, shorter handle time, reduced telco cost and more consistent call volume. In this new eBook, we’ll present these paths to ROI one-by-one, and walk through the calculation needed to build a business case for your organization. To make the math easier to follow, this document will use a fictitious company “ExampleCo” for all the calculations. It will draw from our experiences deploying Fonolo’s cloud-based call-backs, but the concepts are equally applicable to any call-back solution. Continue reading →

How long is too long? Standards like 80/20 for the call center industry help to guide average speed of answer but the truth is, acceptable hold-time varies from industry to industry and from customer to customer. Even a second or two can jeopardize the entire experience in your customer’s eyes, and risk the possibility of an abandoned call. Whether your hold times are longer than the prescribed average or you’re hitting the 80/20 mark, it’s important to provide callers with an accurate expectation of wait time and respectful alternatives to waiting on hold such as a call-back. Continue reading →